Tuesday, June 22, 2021

Openmindedness vs. Closedmindedness as Truth-seeking Strategies

If there is a truth that is "out there", which you want to come to believe, and there is some possibility of believing, trusting in, the wrong thing, you might want a strategy for maximizing the chances of believing or coming to believe that truth. Part of that strategy could be policy on an overall mental climate with which to pursue the truth. One feature of that climate could be openmindedness vs. closedmindedness.

If you are maximally closed-minded, you can only believe the truth (if you happen to have found it) and cannot come to know the truth if you have not yet found it. So in the likely event that you may not yet have the truth, or at best you only have a possibly inadequate or incomplete part of it, you want to be open-minded.

But how open-minded? You can be so open-minded that all truths are the same to you, or none are true to the extent that you trust them at any depth. (To trust a truth enough means that it might cause you to effectively exclude other truths by not trusting them, since we only have so much time and energy to devote to truths.) If so, you will fail to really rely on, trust, what is really true.

Maximally open-minded people can't come to believe in, trust, the truth. So if you are truth-oriented, you will want to be somewhat open-minded, but not maximally so, so that you are more likely to believe the truth in the end.

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